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CHROMIATIC
November 2, 2017
Rev: August 3, 2021
And so, I was shuffling around this morning
dealing with cat issues before coffee, and I
found myself thinking about an episode of the
early 70s television show "Name of the Game"
that had been written by Phillip Wylie. According to Wikipedia,
which provides the episode
name: "L.A. 2017":
This took place in a post-apocalyptic
air pollution future, and there's a [ref]
scene early on where some workers are
out picking up somone who's unconscious. I could've sworn it was
They're singing as they work a slow, by Harlan Ellison.
almost dirge-like song that goes:
Chomiatic triangle
Fifty-Five plus Five
We can prove it.
We can prove it.
At the time, I'd been
thinking about the way that One of the things I
scientific jargon had it's thought was going on
own poetry about it-- in Science Fiction
was that it was an Everyone is familiar
Electrodynamic excuse to work that with passages in SF
sinusoidal oscillations poetry without the full of cool sounding
of subatomic leptons... usual need for techno-babble without
precise meanings. any real scientific
It often seemed to me support behind it.
that Murray Gell-man
had blown it with his This is often regarded
naming scheme for as some sort of cheap
quarks. He, like trick, a reach for
Feynamn, understood "verisimilitude"
that all of those Very without any real
Impressive names were understanding. It's
essentially arbitrary, sciencey but not
and there was nothing scientific.
magicically Scientific
about abusing latin or This is all true, but
greek words. So perhaps misses a
instead he reached different point, and
across the isle to the Many a techie is ignores something about
humanities, lifting afflicted with he way the words
babble from James Joyce the need to prove function.
("three quarks for to the world that
muster mark", as I they've got a DYSON_LULLABY
remember it), to show soul, too.
how clever and literary
he is.
Then he went off naming Gell-man was fighting a war against Feynman's
the properties of terminology-- when Feynamn wanted to suggest
quarks using terms that protons and neutrons are not fundamental
like "color", and are in fact composed of "parts" he started
"strangeness" and using a characteristically unpretentious term:
"charm": a borrowed "partons".
poetry that ignores
a style of poetry In fact, that Leonard Suskind talks about
closer-to-hand. was rather self- putting his foot in it when
consciously he was a young unestablished
The point of these unpretentious, physicist, trying to explain
names was, I think, no? There's no an idea quickly to the great
was simply to snobbery quite Gell-man and *using the
emphasize that they like reverse wrong term*. Gell-man
were completely snobbery. feigned incomprehension,
arbitrary... going into a comedy routine
down in the "what are you talking about,
sub-sub-atomic 'put-ons'? Are you putting
realm our own me on?". This did not
experience has no Another point might exactly put the young
application, be to show what a Susskind at ease.
hot-shot Gell-man
They do not at was: no post-doc
all illuminate, fresh out of grad
however, and I school would've
think they've gotten away with this.
turned out to be
unintentionally
confusing. Because
the words have
conventional I know of one case where someone had
meanings they leave the impression that physicists had
people wondering actually done something very clever
"what are they to codify a physical quantity
trying to get at?" underlying the aesthetic sense of
but the answer is "charm"...
simply "nothing".
That might seem pretty dumb-- and
actually, it is-- but consider that
thermodynamics talks about "order" as
a physical phenomena, when one might
have thought it solely had to do with
the realm of human values.
(I gather it's not established that
human-order and physical-order are
related to each other, but many talk
as though they are.)
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